


Tell Me Again How the World Didn't End

by anextraordinarymuse (December_Daughter)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Non-Graphic Violence, non-specific references to torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 03:50:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6549403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/December_Daughter/pseuds/anextraordinarymuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The chips are gone and everyone is reunited, but if Abby can't find a way to reach Marcus then the past won't be the only thing ALIE took from her. </p>
<p>"She forgets, and then she remembers, and then she rediscovers."</p>
<p>A love story in two parts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tell Me Again How the World Didn't End

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know what this is. It’s a sort of angsty, smutty (ish) one shot that takes place some time in the near future and has a hopeful ending. Disclaimer: I rarely write sex scenes. I hope I didn’t ruin this one because it’s important to the story and to the characters.

_This is the tragedy:_

Abby has loved two men. She has lost two men. One of them still lives.

She forgets, and then she remembers, and then she rediscovers.

She falls in love in the silent spaces.

The brush of a hand; the weight of a gaze; the hint of a smirk; the presence of a body at her side, at her back, at arm’s length; it’s what he does that paves the way for what he says.

Only he doesn’t say anything anymore.

He speaks often but his words rarely tell her what she wants to know. He is tender, and compassionate, and encouraging, but he’s rarely open – not in the way she knows he can be (the way she wants him to be). He’s frightened; he’s full of guilt and anger.

He blames himself.

The words don’t come, but the love does: in soft smiles, and steady touches, and longing gazes. His movements tell a story in two parts.

_I’m sorry; I love you._

What she went through wounded her, but it broke Marcus.

Abby knows a lot about broken things.

If left unattended, a broken bone will heal incorrectly; the only way to reset it is to re-break it.

They are healing incorrectly. Abby is more certain of it with every day that passes: the bridges they’ve spent the last two years building are being neglected and abandoned, and unless she does something soon they will fall into further disrepair, until they are once again facing each other across a chasm. It’ll be worse this time around; she knows the separation will be worse because they’ll have to live knowing that they came so close.

She has to do something now before the road closes to her. If she doesn’t ALIE will not only have damaged her past, but her future as well.

They are healing incorrectly, and Abby has lost this once – she won’t do it again. She’s tired of losing.

So she breaks them (again).

* * *

 

_This is the triumph:_

Abby doesn’t have a plan outside of making him talk to her. She can’t make plans because they never last: they are never alone, and someone always interrupts, and the world has a nasty habit of trying to end every other minute.

The only solution she can think of is to manipulate the situation, so that’s what she does. She waits until it’s dark outside and the camp is asleep – until the veil of night shrouds them in stillness. She goes to Marcus’s room and finds it empty.

Her heart constricts in worry. She waits; if she goes in search of him, he’ll surely return in her absence, and this chance – like countless others – will be lost.

Abby turns on the lamp next to his bed but leaves the overhead light off. His room is clean in a utilitarian way. His bed is made. There are pictures on the wall, one expected and one not, and that almost makes Abby smile. The space is a reflection of its occupant: deceptively simple, yet full of what might seem at first to be contradictions. The only hint of the whimsical exists in one of the pictures on the wall: a naked woman is slung across a bed, and a demon perches on her stomach.

Why that picture? Maybe she’ll ask him.

She lowers herself onto the end of his bed and waits.

The clock on the desk says that some thirty minutes has passed when the door finally opens. Marcus starts in surprise when she stands from the bed.

“Abby?”

His voice is too thick, and the skin beneath his eyes glistens; he’s been crying.

This will be easier, and harder, than she expected.

“I didn’t take the chip voluntarily.”

Marcus’s brows draw together. “I know that.”

“But you need to hear it. You need to hear me say it.”

Marcus steps fully into the room. He closes the door behind him and the motion is so thoughtless that Abby knows he only does so out of habit. His footsteps are heavy and dragging. He doesn’t approach her as he moves to slide off his guard’s jacket and drape it over the back of the desk chair.

  
This is how they are now: separate even in the face of their togetherness. The chasm is at their feet and waiting to swallow them whole if Abby doesn’t find a way to push it back.

“We don’t have to do this, Abby.”

“Yes we do. We can’t keep going like this. We talk, but we don’t say anything. You can barely stand to look at me, and when you do … whatever you see isn’t me.”

His soul is weary behind his words. “Yes it is.”

Marcus turns away from her. He braces both hands on the back of the chair and his shoulders round as he hangs his head.

Abby’s memories of the end are vague: flashes of pain, and loud voices, and bright lights. The concrete details have come to her from other places. She’s wrestled the truth out of everyone except Clarke and Marcus. Asking them would have been cruel.

The end was horrible, but not just for her: it was horrible for everyone forced to stand witness.

This is what fills the empty places between them now: Abby’s screams as ALIE tried to torture her to death with a lifetime of remembered pain.

Abby crosses the distance that separates her from Marcus and puts a hand on his back. Her hip presses into the edge of the desk as she leans into him and over to the side; she tips her head until he’s forced to look at her. She runs her hand over his shoulder blade, up around the curve of his shoulder, and down his arm until she can loop it around his wrist.

“I’m here now,” she whispers.

Marcus looks away and Abby pushes against his wrist until he gives to the pressure and reorients himself to face her. They’re closer now than they have been in weeks.

“Look at me, Marcus. I’m here, right here, with you. I’m okay.”

She’s still holding his wrist so she lifts his hand and places it carefully at the back of her neck, beneath her hair, where the tips of his fingers brush the smooth skin of a new scar. A tremor runs up Marcus’s arm.

He exhales harshly. “Don’t do this, Abby.”

“I might not have remembered it, Marcus, but I felt it. Even when this was gone,” and she motions to her head, “this stayed.”

She slides his hand down over her collar bone until it rests on the bare skin over her heartbeat. Marcus’s thumb twitches; the brush of his finger against her skin. His hand is large and the movement disturbs the chain around her neck. His eyes are drawn to it.

“If I had convinced you to go … if I had come back to Arkadia after Pike was captured …”

“If you play that game we’ll all lose.”

Marcus’s thumb brushes across her skin again. Abby’s breath hitches.

“I’m sorry, Abby. I’m so sorry.”

A tear tracks down his cheek. Abby steps forward and Marcus’s arm bends to accommodate the movement.

“I know. But we have to move on. We have to be here, in the present. I need you to be here, Marcus.”

His eyes don’t leave Abby’s face as she reaches up to kiss him. There’s a delay in his reaction, so she’s started to pull away when he surges forward to recapture her mouth. His beard scratches just as she remembers it, and his breath is warm as her lips part in anticipation. Their second kiss is everything and nothing like their first.

Marcus’s free hand curls around her waist above her hip bone. Abby leans as he pulls and their chests collide; the hand still on her chest slides over her skin until it’s beneath her shirt. She barely has time to register the change before he cups her breast and sweeps a thumb over her nipple through the material of her bra. Abby mouth falls open in a gasp.

“Abby.”

He’s stopped kissing her; he’s stopped moving completely, as if he’s been frozen to the spot, but she can feel him trembling against her.

Abby pushes her hands under his shirt and up his sides. “Don’t stop.”

“Abby …”

He’s so frightened, even now.

“I’m here.”

Those were the first words he’d said to her when she’d opened her eyes and returned to herself.

Marcus dips his head and presses his lips to the underside of her jaw as he squeezes her breast. Abby arches into his hand and exposes her neck to him, shivering at the scratch of his beard as he trails kisses down her throat.

He nips at the skin where her neck and shoulder meet, and Abby decides that she’s had enough.

She has broken them and the pieces lie at her feet, and now they will realign and refashion themselves into something whole, and good.

Abby tugs the hem of Marcus’s shirt upward. He only stops kissing her because the pause allows him to do the same and moments later their shirts are twin piles of forgotten clothing. They start the slow procession to the bed; Abby’s bra gets lost somewhere along the way.

Marcus’s hands are everywhere his lips can’t be, and the sensory overload makes Abby lightheaded. Her breathing fills the air in stuttered puffs.

He puts a hand in the middle of her back as the backs of her knees bump against the edge of the bed. The slightest pressure from his hand has her arching forward once more, and the warm heat of his mouth closes over one of her nipples as he lowers her carefully onto the mattress.

Abby buries a hand in Marcus’s hair as his tongue teases her nipple into a taut point; her other arm wraps around his shoulders and she squeezes him to her. The pressure his hand exerts on her back mirrors the movement, and they are physically holding themselves together as they work to come apart.

She can feel his erection against her thigh. She moves her leg in a short, experimental motion and Marcus growls. He abandons one nipple for the other, but Abby’s nerves are frayed and her patience has evaporated.

“Marcus,” she says, and he understands.

Abby lifts herself up off the mattress to free his hand and Marcus immediately divests her of her remaining clothing. She’s kicking off her boots, the leather biting into her ankles, when silken lips press into the skin above the waistband of her underwear.

She stops him before he can go any farther.

The words she wants to say are right at the edge of her thoughts, but they refuse to come forward. There’s not enough weight to them, not enough substance to make them matter the way they should.

All she can think to say is, “Together.”

That’s what matters now. The word is a mantra through her pleasure-addled thoughts: _together, together, together._

She means to free of him of his pants and boxers, but Marcus is faster. Later, they will experiment; they will discover and learn and commit to memory every detail and scar and exhalation of pleasure.

Now, Abby pulls him back down to the bed with her. There’s a breathless moment where Marcus hovers above her, the single lamp that lights the room backlighting him with a honey glow.

She has to close her eyes when he pushes into her for the first time. He goes slowly, and carefully, allowing her time to adjust, but the pleasure is exquisite. She shivers under the onslaught of sensation.

Marcus brushes her hair off of her forehead. “Are you okay?”

She opens her eyes and finds him watching her. The depth of his concern for her is staggering.

Abby nods. She keeps her eyes on his face as she rolls her hips forward and up, watches his jaw clench as the sensation sweeps through him. She does it again, and he mimics the motion, and they chase each other into a rhythm that drives Abby right over the edge into an orgasm without warning. Marcus is only a heartbeat behind.

They lay together, spent and breathless. His cheek rests against hers, and the solid weight of his body on hers is comforting as their chests heave against one another. Abby drags the pads of her fingers up his sides and grins when his muscles jump. She does it again, and Marcus squirms, and Abby laughs. It’s such an intimate, silly thing to accidentally discover.

Marcus huffs out a chuckle next to her ear and then raises himself up on one arm to look at her. They study each other in vulnerable, content silence.

Then he kisses her sweetly and pulls out of her in one smooth motion. Abby wants to curl up and sleep just as they are, but she knows that the possibility of someone coming to look for Marcus first thing in the morning is high. So she follows Marcus when he stands and retrieves her shirt and underwear as he pulls on his boxers, and then she leads him right back to the bed.

“Six hours of uninterrupted sleep,” she tells him as they slide under the blanket and curl up around each other. “Doctor’s orders.”

* * *

 

When they wake in the morning everything is different but nothing has changed. The fissures are still there, but the chasm has receded; the openness that Abby has been missing has returned in full force.

They are fractured but they’re together, and that’s all the encouragement her hopeful heart needs.

They’re going to be okay.


End file.
